Searching for Grace Kelly

by Michael Callahan

  Dolly pulled her away from the entrance. “Are you crazy?” she said. “We were invited to the Stork, and we are going into the Stork.” She grabbed Laura’s hand, began yanking her down the block. “C’mon.”

  For ten minutes they stood at the corner of Fifty-Third and Fifth, watching New Yorkers whir by in cabs, buses, the occasional DeSoto. Laura rested against a building and fantasized about soaking her feet, while Dolly stalked the intersection like a panther. Laura was just about to declare mutiny and announce that she was pouring herself into the next Checker cab no matter what when Dolly hustled over. “Okay, two o’clock. There’s our ticket.”

  Laura followed her eyes and spotted two men in their thirties—possibly forties—ambling down the street, smoking. One was bald and fat. The other was wiry and better dressed, but with narrow eyes that gave him the appearance of a henchman in a Jimmy Cagney movie. The men crossed the middle of Fifty-Third and fell into line behind a collection of couples entering the Stork. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Look, we only need two warm bodies to get us inside. Then we can do whatever we want.”

  “Dolly, they’re old enough to be my father!”

  “Oh, c’mon, Laura! It’s your first night in New York! It’s the Stork Club! I thought you said you’d come here for adventure. Well, here it is!”

  Before Laura could reply, Dolly was chugging back down the sidewalk, smiling at the approaching duo. “Excuse me, gentlemen, might I trouble either of you for a cigarette?”

  “What’s your name, cutie?” the skinny one asked Dolly. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his cigarette case. Oh, even better, Laura thought. I get the fat one.

  Hasty introductions and several puffs on a Camel later, Dolly had successfully smiled winsomely enough to get them escorted in. The doorman looked up in mild surprise. “You’re lucky it’s a slow night,” he muttered.

  Laura found herself once again astonished by, and admiring of, Dolly’s gumption. I have to remember that this is how you do things in New York.

  She hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps inside when the throbbing inside her shoe began to subside. Even the chubby hand on the small of her back, guiding her to a table, didn’t register.

  She was in the Stork Club.

  Facing the dance floor, the female singer was midway through an up-tempo orchestration of “My Secret Love,” all soft drumbeats and quietly shaking maracas, as couples gently swayed with the music, the men in dark suits, their damsels in tight-bodiced dresses. The air conditioning was at full tilt, but the air was thick with sweat and smoke and better perfume no doubt dispensed earlier in the evening from expensive cut-glass bottles on dainty dressing tables. What is it like, Laura wondered, to come to a place like this all the time? To have this be your normal routine, sitting at a small table in the company of a gentleman, a lamp-shaded candle between you, listening to the gentle clink of glasses and music that sounds like waves crashing upon sand? She looked up at the plunging drapes on the windows, down to the gleaming wood of the dance floor, perked her ears to catch the echo of the loud, flirtatious laughter from the woman sipping champagne and sitting in the booth across the room, book-ended by two men in subtly striped suits. She fought to memorize the scene, every curve and bend and splash of light. This is it. This is the beginning of my life.

  A strong hand on her wrist pulled her out of her thoughts. “Laura, look—there’s Tallulah Bankhead!” Dolly whispered a bit too loudly, her stare directing Laura to a corner banquette, where a stoic, bony woman with forbidding, deep-set eyes and meticulously arched brows smoked a long cigarette as she appeared to ignore the chattering of the man next to her. It certainly looked like Tallulah Bankhead.

  Laura glanced around the table. “Where did Mutt and Jeff go?”

  “They got impatient for the waiter, so they went to get us drinks. I ordered you a brandy. It’s what you drink here.”

  “How would you know what you drink here?”

  “I just know these things, Laura,” Dolly replied, scanning the crowd for the next Tallulah Bankhead.

  “Well!” came a sardonic admonishment from their left, delivered with suitable English gusto. “I see the maidens fair of the Barbizon have arrived.”

  “We shouldn’t even be speaking to you!” Dolly hissed. “Do you have any idea what we had to do to get in here? They don’t allow unescorted women, something you conveniently forgot to mention.”

  “They also seem to have no idea who you are,” Laura chimed in.

  “Oh, rubbish,” Vivian said dismissively. She carried a tray laden with packs of cigarettes and tins of mints and candies. Her pale skin positively glowed in the soft light of the club. Her flaming hair was parted on the side, draping down over one eye in soft waves, like Veronica Lake. Even in her nondescript black dress, with its demure white collar and short sleeves, she managed to look dangerous and sexual, her parted lips full and inviting, smeared with just a swipe of scarlet lipstick. Laura hated her envy, her own longing to be so effortlessly interesting and wicked. “Those sad little men with their lists,” Vivian was saying. “You’d think they were guarding the Café de Paris.”

  A gentleman sitting a few tables away waved for cigarettes. “Duty calls,” she said, drifting off to make the sale.

  Laura hadn’t even noticed the brandy sitting in front of her on the table. Fat One was now standing, hand extended. “Care to dance, baby?”

  The orchestra had struck up the first peppy chords of “Amor.” I’d rather do geometry, Laura thought. But she knew Dolly was right: she was being foolish. She was in the Stork Club. The Stork Club, not walking through Chapin House at Smith.

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  He wasn’t a bad dancer, really. It was sort of impressive how a man that large could be so dainty on his feet, directing her with an ease that would have shamed the boys at her coming out. She had begged Marmy to allow her to skip the whole ritual of the white gloves and the gown and the Brenda Frazier–worthy descent down the stairs into “society.” A major battle she’d lost. But she’d win the war. Now she had the home-court advantage.

  “I’m in hosiery,” Fat One was saying.

  “Sorry?”

  “Hosiery. You know, ladies’ personal garments,” he said conspiratorially. “I sell wholesale to merchants. You could be wearing something of mine right now.” He winked, pulled her a bit closer.

  Oh God. Laura looked around the dance floor. How long could a dance last, anyway? Her foot was aching again. She surveyed the slowly turning couples searching for Dolly. Maybe she could flag down Vivian, profess a sudden craving for a Lucky Strike. Or maybe she’d just tell her burly dancing partner she was a Communist.

  Then he walked in.

  His date was lithe and also blond and utterly predictable, in Laura’s estimation, her hourglass shape poured into a tight-fitting mermaid gown on a Friday night when every other woman was in knee-length department-store issue. Box Barnes was in a tux—they’d obviously just come from somewhere, maybe dinner or the theater—and he was doing what heirs do, smiling and glad-handing and acting generally smarmy. He was no more than ten feet away when she realized she’d unconsciously steered Fat One toward the other end of the dance floor, where Box was now ushering his blonde into a banquette while ordering drinks.

  There was no other truth: he was magnificent. His white teeth, his buffed fingernails, the way his tailored tux trousers crested just so onto the tops of his patent-leather shoes. He could be a murderer or a swindler or just your garden-variety cad with better tailoring, but there was no denying the power of his raw beauty. The term “golden boy” had been invented for men like him.

  Stop staring.

  She pulled back to smile at Fat One just as the song wound down. “What a lovely dancer you are,” she said brightly.

  “Anytime, doll.”

  Twenty minutes and another brandy later, she was on her way back from the ladies’ lounge and feeling a bit woozy. She’d been able to rub
her foot for only a few minutes before shoving it back into her shoe. She’d left Dolly parked on a striped chair, fussing with her curls and musing about whether her old boyfriend Frank would be jealous if he came in and saw her dancing with the Cagney henchman. Threading her way back to the table, Laura felt a slight headache coming on. The thought of more chitchat about ladies’ undergarments seemed too awful to even contemplate.

  She missed colliding with the busboy’s tray by inches. In hindsight it was a miracle—either of gravity or circus acrobatics on his part—that kept the empty glasses from crashing in five different directions, but whatever the case, Laura found herself falling backward when she felt a strong hand at her back and another at her arm. “Whoa, Nelly.”

  She whirled around, directly into the gaze of Box Barnes.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to have you cut off, young lady.”

  She wanted to say something, but there was . . . nothing. Just an intense stare, the kind you gave a particularly exotic animal at the zoo. His face remained as ethereal as it had been from the safety of the dance floor. But up close there was something more discernible in his blue eyes, a hint of mockery that Laura tried to wish away so it wouldn’t spoil the illusion.

  “Pardon my manners. I’m—”

  “I know who you are,” she blurted out.

  “Hmm. I had a feeling you did.”

  “You . . . you did?”

  “Well, you were looking at me earlier today. That was you in the Barbizon coffee shop, right? And you’ve been staring at me all night.”

  She took a slight step back, shrugged out of his arm. “Yes . . . well, thank you. For the assistance. I . . . I’m wearing new shoes. And I haven’t been staring.”

  He leaned in, the mockery now stronger, more brilliant in his eyes, and flashed the smile that had no doubt dazzled dozens of girls. Perhaps hundreds. “There’s no need to be coy. You’re in the Stork. You want a special night. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I can make that happen for you.”

  “I watched you come in with someone.”

  “There’s more nights than just tonight, you know.”

  Clarity seized her. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  Box slipped his arm around her waist, pulled her closer. “I doubt that.”

  She pushed back, forcefully. “You should.”

  The mask dropped, just an inch. “Are you really going to play hard to get, baby? I could have any woman in this place.”

  “Except for one.”

  He smiled. “What’s your name?”

  She hesitated. My God, he’s good-looking. “Laura.”

  “Laura what?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because I want to know, and people tell me things I want to know.”

  She deliberately looked over his shoulder. “Maybe people give you too much of what you want.”

  He sighed. “I don’t seem to be making a very good impression.”

  “On the contrary,” she said. “You’re not making any impression at all.”

  His brow furrowed, and Laura couldn’t tell whether he was amused or insulted. His next words were more spat out than said. “You’re either a fake-out, stupid, or both.”

  She tossed out her best look of nonchalance. “You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t put a lot of weight in criticism from a man named for a cardboard container.”

  She brushed past him and walked briskly back toward the entrance, her mind urging her to go faster, equally out of fear of reprisal and wanting to savor this, relish rising to the occasion in hand-to-hand combat with a lout who also happened to be one of Manhattan’s most famous men about town. She felt a hand at her elbow. “Let go of me!”

  “Good grief, what is the matter with you?!” Dolly exclaimed. Two couples sipping martinis looked over. “What’s wrong? I saw you talking to Box Barnes! What did—”

  Laura pulled her by the arm and hustled toward the doors, Dolly’s protestations drowned out by the opening notes of another dance number. A few seconds later they were out on the sidewalk, rushing toward the beckoning roof light of a cab as Laura tried not to think about how badly the blister on the back of her foot hurt.

  THREE

  “I can’t believe how stingy you’re being.”

  Dolly was pouting, or at least attempting a pout, a difficult maneuver when you had such a sunny face. She and Laura were in the back of a cab on their way downtown on a bright, beautiful late morning, the windows down. The oppressive humidity that had enveloped them leaving the Stork last night had broken, opening the door to a clear summer day.

  It had been a day much like this that provided Laura with her earliest memory of New York. She had come in with Grandmother Dixon, on what would become a series of “just us girls” visits to the city on the train, until the combination of her grandmother’s worsening arthritis and the arrival of her younger brother led to their demise.

  But, oh, those trips. Wonderful, sparkly, whimsical trips down Fifth Avenue, and clip-clopping in a carriage through Central Park in the heady years after the war, always ending at the Palm Court at the Plaza, where Laura would sit in her best dress and patent-leather shoes as Grandmother Dixon poured the tea and primly slid scones and tiny sandwiches with cucumbers onto her plate. And during every visit she would point out the people who served—the waiters and bellmen and hosts—and ask Laura to think about where they came from, what the lives were like for the people who were not sitting there enjoying the restaurant, but rather working in it. “You always need to remember that there are many, many people less fortunate,” she would say. “We all have an obligation to help those who need it.” Laura would dutifully relay all of this to her father on the evening of their return, resulting in his inevitable comment to Marmy, “Mother’s been playing Eleanor Roosevelt again.”

  “Are you listening to a word I’ve been saying?” Dolly asked.

  Laura jolted out of her reverie. “I’ve told you, there isn’t anything more to tell,” she said.

  Dolly had been relentless. She’d spied the encounter with Box Barnes and had, from the moment they’d left the club, wanted to know everything: every word exchanged, how he’d looked up close, smelled up close, whether his mouth was truly as kissable as it looked in pictures. Laura had elected to take a name-rank-and-serial-number approach to parsing out details. The truth was she’d been embarrassed by the whole interlude: how he’d obviously caught her staring, but mostly how she had walked into the Stork Club feeling worldly and sophisticated and left feeling unmasked, the little girl caught prancing about in her mother’s heels and pearls.

  “You’re being very circumspect about the whole business,” Dolly was saying. Laura arched an eyebrow. “What? Don’t look at me that way, Laura Dixon,” Dolly shot back. “I’m in secretarial school, remember? I take dictation with big vocabulary words all the time. I’m not stupid.”

  “I would never think you were stupid.”

  Dolly shrugged. “Just drop it. You’ll tell me when you’re ready. You just better be ready soon.” They both giggled. “So, how was the tour?”

  “Uneventful.” The tour. Still foggy from the brandy, Laura had dragged herself out of bed and gotten dressed just in time to make her nine a.m. appointment for the Barbizon orientation, once again finding Metzger behind the desk, pinched and vinegary. Did the woman ever go home? There was still no sign of the elusive Mrs. Mayhew, presumably still “off premises,” and no explanation as to why she hadn’t kept Laura’s appointment. And so Laura and Metzger had spent the better part of an hour exploring the hotel, like Mrs. Danvers and Joan Fontaine death-marching through an all-female Manderley. Laura had received her “Court Circular,” which listed that week’s activities, from dramatic readings (this week, from the works of the ailing Wallace Stevens) to a backgammon tournament. The swimming pool had looked surprisingly inviting, if a tad over-chlorinated—the whole potted-ferned area reeked of bleach—and they’d briefly lingered to watch an
aggressive badminton match between two ponytailed girls. After the sundeck, the solarium, the recital rooms, and the dining room, they’d finished on the mezzanine, where a latticed wooden railing overlooked the expansive lobby below.

  “I noticed,” Laura had inquired of Mrs. Metzger, “last night when I was leaving, that there were a few girls milling about here, all dressed up. Was there some special occasion?”

  “That’s the way it is every evening, most noticeably on Saturdays,” Metzger had replied, her raven-black eyes honing in on a group of girls sitting in the lobby lounge below. “Rather than wait downstairs, many of the girls choose to stay up here, so they can survey their dates arriving. That way, if a gentleman doesn’t appear as she’d hoped, a girl can simply not go down at all.” She’d turned to Laura, her face still as inscrutable as it had been yesterday behind the desk. “It’s discourteous and the kind of behavior we discourage here at the Barbizon, but we do not wield indiscriminate control over every young woman’s manners. Or lack thereof.”

  Dolly had taken in Laura’s recounting with a gravity reserved for a pastor’s sermon. “Well, I can’t believe I am saying this, but I think I’m warming up to Metzger,” she said. “Her reputation may be as an old fuddy-duddy, but the lady has standards, and I admire that. Though I don’t think she’d kick a girl out for a silly violation and leave her stranded on the sidewalk with her suitcases, like some of the others would. But if I’m being honest, I am one of the girls who would stand on the mezzanine to check out her date.” She glanced out the window, then added wistfully, “If I ever had a date.”

  Soon they were standing on MacDougal Street, two blocks south of Washington Square. “Why, oh, why are we here again?” Dolly asked.